Idealization of Nostalgia

Images have been around as long as humans have been able to get their hands on some pigment. The first oil painting was created in the 15th century, and the first photograph was taken in 1826. However, as time went on and art continued to evolve, paintings and pictures started to be depicted more dramatized scenes than what the eye sees. Through countless art movements, western art world would look back to the way the ancient Greeks and Romans created art and tried to recreate it. This nostalgia was the inspiration behind the Italian Renaissance and continued for centuries. For as long as humans have been creating art, we have idealized the world around us, when it comes to the human form or general lifestyle. Looking to the past for the ideal style of life, nostalgia has warped our perception of the ideal for centuries and has no foreseeable ending. Today we see this on Instagram and other social media cultures.

The documentation of normal contemporary life has expanded with the creation of social media.  Instagram, for example, is focused more on photos more than anything else. Users post things about their life, their face, anything. When people users become interconnected in this fashion, trends and new styles start coming in and out at rapid pace. Instagram trends include anything you can think of: makeup, clothes, memes, art, food, etc. These trends definitely include photography itself. Instagram users use apps that were created to give photos a more “weathered” and “vintage” look to connect mobile phone pictures to earlier analog photography. For example, users put specks of dust and other features on the photo to make it look like the negative of the photo had become corrupted in development. Another example of this is users taking overexposed images on polaroids and reposting them on their phones. It's normal to see these warped pictures of the users we follow every day. What this means is that these users feel that posting a photo of a polaroid makes their experience more real and more believable because that was a way people shared and viewed images in the past. It's an interesting concept because the more a person taints a photograph the further it moves away from what real authentic life would look like.

This type of photography is most likely a product of the technology boom that started in the 1990's. Products need a set period so they can be recognized as a separate form from the rest. Pair that with the amount of content that people produce and post on the internet. Users may feel that they are blending in too much. So to make photos look more "fun, unique and special for sharing," (Bakhshi, 1) users use filters and edits to set them apart from the rest. Not only does this still happen rapidly today, but the idealization of lifestyles and our physical form has occurred all over art history to make the individual feel better over their peers. This type of mentality to always push to be better from others comes from hundreds of years ago and travels through different mediums, like paintings.

The concept of idealizing the human body and the world came from the Italian Renaissance, more specifically, Raphael and Michelangelo.  Both painters would depict human beings in idealized ways; Michelangelo painted his with perfect proportions and giant muscles, while Raphael would paint his also with perfect proportions but highly idealized softness and fragility. “Raphael’s paintings epitomise the idealization of female beauty of this period but, by his admission they were rarely based on real models” (Haughton, 1). However, these artists had to get these ideas from somewhere, and in fact, they got them from looking back to ancient Greek and Roman art. The Renaissance period is an entire period of trying to bring back the type of art and antiquity that came with this culture. They were nostalgic for this time where they believed it was the ideal type of art, architecture, myths, etc. It's these rules of the body that set the standards for the Art Academy of Design and many hundreds of European oil paintings afterward.

During the Renaissance, an artist would learn to paint by a professional artist taking in a few apprentices and teaching them one on one. This changed when art academies started to pop up around Europe in the 1500s, a different way to teach students with larger classes. Soon, however, these academies became the “authoritarian arm” (Britannica, 1) of the art community. All the academies across Europe, in their might, made a hierarchy of what is considered the best type of art. Still-life and landscape were at the bottom while narrative paintings, paintings of a story (usually involving mythology or antiquity) to teach viewers lessons through the images, sat at the very top. Art critics and people who were actually interested in buying the paintings followed this set guide when they judged the artwork in exhibitions. Because of this, some artists had to go by the academy's rules to make a living from paintings, and most weren't very happy about this. Those angry artists started many movements to push back and reject the Academy's ideas and rules of what art should look like and created art from what they saw. They called themselves the pre-Raphaelites.

The pre-Raphaelites directly rejected the ideas and images that Raphael brought forth into the art community, but they also dismissed the stories, narratives, and nostalgia the academy pushed in the paintings they praised. This particular movement started in 1848 and ended in 1890. These painters believed that the artists before the Italian Renaissance depicted and painted in a way that showed how humans naturally looked and strived to be like them in their own artwork. However they also wanted to challenge "Victorian moralism" and demonstrate "that modern life could be renewed by spiritualism, artistic freedom, and poetry." (Souter, 1) These artists were nostalgic for the time before; they felt it was more morally correct and at the same time it was beautiful.

However, the ideals and nostalgia for antiquity from the academy stuck and has crept all the way to the present. Like stated before, Instagram is full of idealized photos, and one ideal modern art could not shake is the ideals of the human body. Over time, what has been considered beautiful in the human body has changed, but the notion of having a 'perfect' shape is still well and alive.

On Instagram, photos are staged to make the model or person look as fit as possible, only showing the viewer their best angle in a flexed position.  However, there is some pushback against these images. Some more famous users post photos of themselves in the preferred pose, juxtaposed with a version of themselves that is relaxed. They do this to bring forth more body positivity, but over 100 years later these pictures espouse the same ideas as the pre-Raphaelites. They actively acknowledge that what they post is highly idealized and shown in a way that is impossible to recreate while being in a relaxed position.

While some select Instagram users and pre-Raphaelites agree that the portrayal of these kinds of ideals is unnatural and highly idealized, it's also where their similarities end. The Pre-Raphaelites were a group of painters fighting against something more physical, while these Instagrammers are taking a shot in the dark with sparse body positivity posts and  they're fighting something much more different. They're fighting a very ingrained mentality. However, there still is hope; it took decades of movements to finally get rid the conventions around art that the academy had brought.

The only significant difference between hundreds of years ago and now is the platforms and mediums that we use to share and to create images. Instagram, as well as oil paintings, are ways to tell stories to inform and to look aesthetically pleasing. In the end, humans will always idealize life to give themselves a goal to be better. But it's only healthy in small doses, unlike the waves of it we receive today. Hopefully, in the future, the mentality that we're fighting today will be extinguished and replaced with something that is not as destructive to the human psyche. Still, it is interesting to note that all of this started from artists being nostalgic for ancient Greek and Roman art. And today the same baseline mentality continues to thrive.

Citations

Bakhshi, Saeideh et al. “Why We Filter Our Photos and How It Impacts Engagement.” ICWSM (2015).

Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Academy of Art.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 26 Sept. 2011, www.britannica.com/art/academy-of-art.

Haughton, Neil. “Perceptions of beauty in Renaissance art.” Journal of cosmetic dermatology 3 4 (2004): 229-33.

Hunt, William Holman. Our English Coasts. 1852, Tate Britain, Millbank, Westminster, London.

Jurgenson, Nathan. “The Faux-Vintage Photo: Full Essay (Parts I, II and III).” Cyborgology, The Society Pages, 23 May 2013, thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/05/14/the-faux-vintage-photo-full-essay-parts-i-ii-and-iii/.

Puto, Sara, “sitting down and sucking in vs relaxing 🌿”, Instagram, Feb, 12, 2018.   https://www.instagram.com/p/BfGIx_xlfp9/?taken-by=saggysara

Raphael.The Triumph of Galatea. 1514, Villa Farnesina, Via della Lungara, 230, 00165 Roma RM, Italy.

Souter, Anna. “The Pre-Raphaelite Movement Movement, Artists and Major Works.” The Art Story, www.theartstory.org/movement-pre-raphaelites.htm.